Recently I was reading a superb review article [doi] on the subject of a famous and important cellular signaling pathway called the Notch pathway.

Modelling taxa is a bit trickier. I've sketched my ideas for distinguishing name strings and taxonomic names earlier. That's the easy stuff. What about "taxonomic concepts" and "OTUs"? As a first pass, I'm looking at linking taxon names to classifications via GUIDs.

Time to make some notes. I've been playing with using Sematic Mediawiki to create a database of taxonomic names, literature, specimens, sequences, and phylogenies. One challenge is to come up with simple ways to model these entities, in a way that makes both data entry simple and querying as simple as possible. Some things are straightforward. For example, a publication can be modelled like this: OK, I've ignored the attributes.

I've mentioned before that we've had an intelligent design proponent (code named Timaeus) as an official guest on the ASA email list. The discussion has been mostly useful. One thing that became clear early on was the fact that Timaeus is not a scientist and has not read much science outside of the works of ID defenders.

About 2 months ago, I finished a series on Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution. I concluded that it was a terrible book, displaying significant errors of both fact and judgment. The book's main argument is a population genetics argument, and Behe seems to have little knowledge or understanding of that difficult subject.

Okay, wow, that was a long hiatus. I can explain, really I can. Here's a report on my activities in the last six weeks. I wandered into Telic Thoughts in search of intelligent intelligent design advocates.

In a previous post, I started to explain a fact that some people (who don't know me) seem to find surprising or noteworthy. Michael Behe is a Christian who accepts common ancestry and an ancient cosmos, so you'd think I would be excited about the work of a fellow "theistic evolutionist." But I'm not. Two overall problems come to mind.

In The Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe presents arguments against the role of random mutation in large-scale evolutionary change, using probability calculations that are so utterly mishandled that they call into question his scientific credibility and integrity.

Below is my fifth contribution to the discussion at Uncommon Descent, in the thread called "Theistic Evolutionists...we can help you." My previous post, addressed to "jerry," has not gone up on UD, for reasons unknown. Perhaps readers can spot the problem (e.g., a dirty word hidden in some scientific jargon) and UD visitors can pass that information to the UD magistrates.

A few interesting responses on the Theistic Evolutionists...We Can Help You thread at Uncommon Descent, one from a poster named jerry who asked a few straightforward questions. My response is below as usual. To Jerry @68: Thanks for the words of welcome. I need to be relatively brief now, especially on Behe's work, but I'm happy to discuss biology and evolution with anyone anytime, and I welcome questions, the more specific the better.